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Rachel Hyman and Tracy Dimond

My Time in Exile

We’re around corners again,
reciting words from past songs
grown from long walks home.
It’s easier to say this depth comes
from missed calls. A degree that matters–
maybe it’s okay to live without heat. Endeavoring
nostalgia drops to the ground where somethingis kept safe. One-time selves line up to receive
or be received. The mist of memory snakes
around the table legs. It overstays a while.
We buy it drinks and ask it about best times.
Pounding for other days around corners,
traveled easily in cabs. Mostly we keep up
appearances & keep it together. Sometimes
through the fissures shine less pint glasses,
more irises with questions.
We’ve grown? Our apartments
shrink with each addition to the bed.
The footprints on the carpet matter like
shells so easily cast off. Can you really
rid yourself of anything, though?
Lights blink on the runway as we close
our eyes, bound for separate towns,
for good.

Good For You

On park benches with mantras
explaining greatness
I upload reasons to fear me.
DNA on matches outside your Facebook,
painting my nails and waiting.
Your voice catches like a fish leaping
out of net. There’s a hard edge to sideways
glances stolen from a store of gestures
made to mislead. Drive this point home:
I believe in everything and nothing
while wind whips through my ears
into my brain. Not like you warming
the mattress next to me, but that
“lost in teeth” feeling. Can you feel
those teeth? The flush as I had feared?
That artless smile, turning & turning?

“The poems published here take their name and inspiration from the music of the band Third Eye Blind. They are part of a larger collaborative endeavor born out of our shared love for this oft-ridiculed 90s band. Despite never (yet) having met in person, we became fast friends when we discovered our shared affinity for the band. One of us recently marveled, only half jokingly, that Third Eye Blind manages to cover the entire spectrum of human emotion. It may seem self-consciously ironic to frame an entire collaborative writing project around the band’s music, but the band has mattered to both of us, as has poetry itself. The sliver of pop culture has helped us and inspired us in earnest. We’ve aimed to use the musical and lyrical content of their songs as a springboard to write poems that invoke, move, capture some tiny slice of being human–much as we feel Third Eye Blind’s music has done for us. The resulting poems are not bits of Tracy & Rachel patched together, but rather a whole that sometimes walks a little funny yet still finds its way in this beautiful throbbing world. We hope you find resonances of that world as well in our poems, and that they bring you closer to your personal Third Eye Blind.”

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Rachel Hyman is based out of Detroit, where she co-curates the Motor Signal reading series. She is the co-editor of Banango Street. Recent work has been published or is forthcoming in Illuminati Girl Gang, The Scrambler, and Vector.

Tracy Dimond co-curates Ink Press Productions. She is the author of Grind My Bones Into Glitter, Then Swim Through The Shimmer (NAP 2014) and Sorry I Wrote So Many Sad Poems Today (Ink Press 2013). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Big Lucks, the Fanzine, Be About It, Coconut, Everyday Genius, Hobart, and other places.